1. Field of the Invention
The present invention-relates to an image display apparatus and a computer program product for displaying moving picture contents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Usage of a search function is a method generally utilized in daily work with an information processing apparatus such as a PC. For example, Web search for searching information relating to a specific keyword from a website on the Internet has been used by many people. For the search function by the information processing apparatus, a search method in which a user actively inputs a keyword is generally used, such that the user inputs a keyword relating to a search item, to obtain a search result. In this specification, this search method is referred to as an active search method. Further, in the field of AV apparatuses such as a TV, a DVD recorder, and a HDD recorder, IT deployment has been advanced, so that AV apparatuses can be connected to the Internet. Accompanying this trend, a search function that is similar to the active search method of PCs has been employed also for AV apparatuses.
However, the number of contents accessible by the user is rapidly becoming much larger due to increase of content retention capacity of AV apparatuses, popularization of content providing services such as VOD, and seamless accesses between AV apparatuses or to contents present on the Internet.
With the popularization of the HDD recorder, user's manner of obtaining contents or user's viewing manner is also changing. That is, user's viewing manner is changing from a manner in which only a content which the user wishes to watch is recorded to a passive manner in which contents of interested contents are temporarily recorded and the user chooses one therefrom, or contents are automatically recorded by using a recommendation service or an automatic recording service. In the latter case, the contents accessible by the user can include what the user himself is not aware of.
On the other hand, it has been an important issue as to how to efficiently arrive at a desired content among a huge amount of content groups. Due to the change of the user's content-obtaining or viewing manner, the user is not always aware of all the recorded contents. Therefore, even if the user tries to search a content by the active search function, he may not be able to know what keyword to use for the search, and therefore it can be difficult to arrive at a desired content. Further, the active search function installed in AV apparatuses is used only by a part of users, and it is not a convenient search method for many users.
As a solution to the above problem, usage of a passive search method instead of the active search method can be considered. The passive search method is such that certain content is used as a base, and relevance between the content and other contents is presented to the user, so that the user can perform content search suggestively. That is, according to this search method, the user can arrive at a content of interest by selecting displayed contents without explicitly searching the content using the keyword. Therefore, in the passive search method, visualization of contents that share relevance with each other is an important feature for improving a search rate.
Meanwhile, various methods for visualizing the relevance between images have been proposed. For example, International Publication No. WO00/33572 discloses a method for sequentially enlarging images in an order of time series for expressing a time-series relationship between a plurality of images, to helically display the enlarged images in the order of time series.
However, in moving pictures such as a TV image and a video image, which are intended by AV apparatuses, the image in a reproduced frame sequentially changes with reproduction of the moving picture. Therefore, the relevance between images changes with a lapse of time. Accordingly, in the method described in International Publication No. WO00/33572 that intends still pictures, the relevance between moving pictures cannot be visualized.